John Hejduk: The Poetic Imagination as a Social Political Act

In this talk, Professor David Gersten, will discuss the poetic, spatial imaginations, and social politics in John Hejduk’s works. He will address the poetic imagination as a dimension of human life, and a means of addressing our social political lives.
In collaboration with Power Station of Art Shanghai (PSA)
David Gersten is an artist, architect, writer, and educator based in New York City. He is Distinguished Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Learning at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he has taught since 1991 and has served as Associate Dean under Dean John Hejduk and Acting Dean of the School of Architecture. Gersten is also currently a visiting professor at Rhode Island School of Design, an International Visiting Scholar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in the UK and a member of the Board of Directors of Big Picture Learning.
Gersten is the founding Director and President of Arts Letters & Numbers, a non-profit arts and education organization dedicated to expanding the experiences understood as education through creating new structures and spaces for creative exchange across disciplines. He works in collaboration with international organizations, educational and cultural institutions, and education policy groups including UNICEF, the United Nations Academic Impact division and Education Reimagined, and recently presented a keynote address entitled “Unlocking the Creativity of Youth” at the UNICEF-EXPO and at the Chancellors Summit at CAFA in Beijing.
Gersten’s works, which include drawings, stories, essays, films, prints, performances, buildings, and constructions, have appeared in international exhibitions and performance spaces and are held in the collections of the Canadian Center for Architecture, the New York City Public Library’s print collection, and private collections. Gersten is currently an official exhibitor, in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, where he is directing and curating Arts Letters & Numbers exhibition titled: “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” He has published internationally on topics ranging from emergent disciplinary geographies to the links between embodied experience, cognition, memory, perception, language, space, and education.

[@lisanne341]

Beautiful beautiful talk! It moved me deeply, I’m so thankful David is spreading the word and silence of John’s structures